


The Last Road Home

by acupoftea



Category: The Walking Dead & Related Fandoms, The Walking Dead (Telltale Video Game), The Walking Dead (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 10:12:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6952435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acupoftea/pseuds/acupoftea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Clementine and Survival, on everything before, after, and in-between. </p><p>(An almost introspective piece on Clem & the struggle of living).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Road Home

**Author's Note:**

> Here's looking at you, kid.

She’s seven and she’s sitting on one of the lower branches of the tree as her dad hammers down nail after nail after nail into the hard wood.  
Her mum swings gently back and forth on the swing and it looks a bit funny, a grownup like her on something meant for a kid. But the bark is soft today and the sun shines down and she doesn’t laugh because she knows how fun the swing can be. Her parents have promised ice cream after, if they get all the wood done in time. 

Her treehouse is going to be the best one in the world.

-  
She’s twelve and by this point all the states have started to blur together slightly, like boundaries don’t matter so much as the walker zones, cities, regions. Some days it seems like maybe she’s the last person left in the whole world. Well, except for AJ. And Jane. And Patricia and Gill. 

Randy died a year ago. 

But not since then have they come across any new people, despite the last four months of moving, searching, a desperate hunt for a good night’s sleep, a safe place, a something.  
She needed something, had needed it for the last five years. 

(she knew by now that she was never going to find the Something, but she had to keep going. For AJ. For Lee.)

But in four months they hadn’t found anyone new. Anyone at all.  
(And the walkers don’t count).

She had traced and retraced footsteps and there was a time coming when they might have to leave the country for good, she knew.

It was always the same choice.  
Stay or leave.  
Run or hide.

-  
She’s twelve and there’s a map that she keeps close, no matter what (the same way she holds tight to lee’s photograph and duck’s drawing and sarah’s glasses and the hat, always the hat).  
But the map – it was the only true thing she had left.

It’s a map of the country, marked with everywhere they’ve been, everyone they’ve met.  
There are names scrawled all over it, names like ‘ben’ and and ‘mark’ and ‘kenny’ and ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ and ‘luke’ and ‘sandra’ and ‘alvin’ and-  
There’s a lot.  
Marking all the places she left them, they left her.  
(she never wants to forget, not ever)  
She lives and they don’t so she carries them with her instead.  
She lives and they don’t so she keeps them close, keeps AJ close, keeps moving, keeps her hair short, keeps surviving.  
She lives because they don’t get to.

-  
Jane gets bitten on a Tuesday, a week before her thirteenth birthday.  
She kills herself early Wednesday morning, a single shot ringing out across their camp just as the day begins to break.  
Clem never expected it and it was so stupid because she should’ve known she knows jane oh god she should’ve stopped her she should’ve-

Jane is dead and she takes out her map and adds her name and it’s 4 or 5 or 6am except it doesn’t really matter because time isn’t a thing anymore it’s just day and night and Jane is still dead and she doesn’t even know how to begin to explain it to AJ because he was too young when Randy, (Patricia and Gill’s dad) died but this is different and she’s the first one to find her body and she doesn’t let AJ into the tent, not for anything, tells Patricia to keep the kids distracted while she moves Jane the body except no, because it’s Jane and she’s dead. 

And Clem can’t help herself she’s crying (and she hates it when she cries) and shaking and clutching the map to her chest because it’s never going to end it’s never ever going to be over and she thought this time they were going to make it but she should’ve known better.

She should have known.

-  
There’s rumours flying around about a cure (there always is).  
Their camp was overrun a week ago (it always happens – no matter what) and Patricia’s and Gill’s names have been on the map for a while now, as well as some new ones – Jamie, Ted, Grace – the list just keeps getting bigger and she’s finally learnt the lesson that everyone else seemed to catch onto first. 

It’s just not worth it anymore.

People die and they keep dying and it’ll be easier, from now on, if it’s just her and AJ.  
(So why does it hurt so much?)

But there’s a “cure” or say they say and the years keep flying by and she can’t believe she’s fifteen and despite her very well-honed, very sharp instincts (there’s a reason she’s survived for so long) she goes to the camp named “Tara” in Georgia.  
By the time she gets there there’s no one there except walkers.  
Overrun.  
Again.

-  
She’s fourteen years old and she has a flashlight in one hand, a book in the other. Crouched in the back of a dust ridden library in Georgia, AJ tucked in a blanket, and a backpack for a pillow. There’s a stack of books next to her and she takes them one by one, skimming them and either placing it in her own backpack or putting it back. Taking care of a toddler had never been something she’d envisioned herself doing as a teenager, but then she’d never envisioned herself doing a lot of things she's been made to do.

And she thinks of everything else left ahead of them, and how she hasn’t slept in months, how she probably never will again because one of them has to keep watch, because she can’t risk it, because she’s the grown up now and if she slept then she’d dream and that’s one of the few things she’s not strong enough to handle.  
And there’s so much more to come – there’s so much blood already on her that Clementine thinks if she ever took another bath again she’d stain them not just red but black.  
And it’ll all be worth it if it’s for AJ (and every day she understands Lee a bit more, understands the world and maybe Kenny was right, maybe-)

And for a moment she gets a glimpse of the future; she will teach him how to use a gun (the train rattles under her feet and his arms wrap around hers, steadying her aim), build fires (the silence churns between her and christa and the space omid and the buried baby left between them is so large that she’s starting to forget what her own voice sounds like), the most effective way to take down a walker (and at the time jane seemed like some sort of superhero she killed walkers so easily like it was nothing like she wasn’t afraid of anything) – she has lost so much and she will give the rest to him, she will give up everything if it means he survives.

But mostly, firstly, finally, she will do for AJ what no one else has done, and she will live.  
-  
Sixteen and it’s bursting, it’s hot, it’s summer, she holds tight to AJ and spins him in the water – his laugh as bright as the day is, and Sam swims up behind her, splashing the back of her head and neck and she feels herself breaking open as she smiles. She turns and watches Ali dunk Sam and then she laughs, clear and high, and she feels an eight year old girl inside her taking her hand. It’s something so close to letting go and for once she doesn’t turn away. 

She passes AJ to Sam, he puts him on his shoulders and AJ shouts “Clem look!” He’s reaching up like he could touch the sun and Clementine feels a burst of happiness so startling, so unfamiliar and long overdue. 

She ducks her head under the water, everything goes silent and still for a moment and her heart is bursting and there is no apocalypse, there is nothing beyond them, beyond the pale blue and the light and the reflection blinding the four of them.

She comes up for air, and she comes up for air and she’s coming up for air and it feels like it, the world is new and she is alive, and she is

and for this moment they cannot be touched.

-  
Clementine is tired. Clementine is killing a walker or their next meal or a man who tried to take advantage of her or any other infinite possibility of all the evil that is out to get her and AJ. Clementine is tired and she is watching their house – their once temporary home burn down. She is covered in blood once again after another battle, another fight out of that collapsing home of theirs and she’s holding AJ tight to her. He’s crying and the smoke is what warned them, what suffocated them out so that they had no choice but to run, and there had been a chance – a real chance this time of settling down, settling in, and she should know better by now, she should-

AJ is asking her where the others are (“where’s sammy, Clem, where is he?”) and she cannot reply, she cannot even think it and she’s so tired. She’s tired and she is burning like she never made it out, fuming with rage at the grief that is already burying deep, rage at the world that keeps taking and taking and taking and how she still hasn’t figured out how to survive without losing in the first place, rage at the unfairness of it all, of growing up before her body did, at getting to survive, at never ever getting to stop, just the false promise of it and-

The rage dies down with the fire and all that is left is a smoking husk.

And Clementine is so tired. 

-  
She’s nineteen and it’s been ten years since the world ended and AJ is the same age that she was then and there hasn’t been one single day since that Lee’s advice hasn’t protected her, that she hasn’t thought about him, wished again and again and again he was still here. There hasn’t been one single day that it hasn’t hurt.

She tries to remember them all, but sometimes it’s too much, sometimes (most of the time) she can’t and she tries not to admit it, but there’s some part of her that doesn’t want to.  
She is part girl, part memory, and it’s been ten years and she’s starting to think maybe it’s time she was part girl, part living.  
-

She tells AJ stories of his parents (she won’t tell him how they died, not yet, not til he’s older – and he will get older – though she wonders if it’s worth it in a world like this) and she tells him about her parents. About Lee.  
He’s eight years old and just like time, age is no long relative. Being a teenager doesn’t mean anything here. Being a kid means even less.  
(and then a conversation floats back to her, one she overheard once years and years ago, “you ain’t little, you ain’t a girl, you ain’t boy, you ain’t strong or smart, you’re alive.”)

But she is strong, she’s smarter (smarter than all of them) and it’s the only thing that’s kept her alive.  
She lives so AJ can live, and she’s starting to think that they made it for a reason, that it used to be months but now it’s almost a year since they’ve run into someone real, someone living, and that if they are here then it means something. That she has to make it mean something, but most of all that she has to make it.  
That she will. 

(It’s a promise that she keeps having to make, something that she keeps reminding herself of, bruised knuckles and all, because it is the only thing she has left to lean on.)

-  
She’s eleven years old and Luke’s dead, Luke’s dead, Luke’s dead (he wasn’t meant to die, like Lee wasn’t meant to die and Sarah wasn’t meant to die and-)  
-and Bonnie’s asking her if she’s ever had any regrets like she can read Clem’s mind.  
“I wish I had never looked for my parents”  
and it’s the truest thing she’s said in a long time-  
and it hurts everyday it hurts-  
because if she hadn’t run away then Lee, her Lee he would be alive and-  
so many people would be alive-  
but instead Luke’s dead as well-  
“I wish I had never looked for my parents” and the smoke from Bonnie’s cigarette swirls in the air in front of her and she’s not scared, not anymore.  
-

She’s nine years old and she’s shivering, she can’t help it. She was talking to the man on the radio like he was her dad, and now she’s watching him kill Sandra (no, not Sandra, not anymore, she’s young but she’s not stupid), and for just a moment as he stands up, turns to face her, bloody hands and all, she thinks maybe he was sent by her parents, maybe he’s here to protect her.

Well, only one of those things end up coming true, but for now she takes his hand and it is so warm, so alive in a world where there already seem to be only the dead left. 

She takes his hand and he leads her and Clementine knows in that moment that everything is going to be ok.


End file.
